Tag: European Space Agency
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Soyuz crew set for Friday launch to space station
STORY WRITTEN FOR CBS NEWS & USED WITH PERMISSION Paolo Nespoli, Sergey Ryazanskiy and Randy Bresnik pose for a picture after a crew news conference Thursday at the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan. Credit: NASA/Joel Kowsky Launch of a Russian Soyuz spacecraft Friday carrying three fresh crew members to the International Space Station will boost the lab’s crew…
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Launcher for next space station crew in position for liftoff Friday
A Russian Soyuz rocket made a railroad journey Wednesday to its launch pad in Kazakhstan, two days before blastoff with a crew of three spaceflight veterans from the United States, Italy and Russia heading for the International Space Station. The three-stage rocket departed an assembly building just after sunrise Wednesday on a special rail car…
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Pioneering probe for gravitational wave observatory ends mission
Artist’s illustration of the LISA Pathfinder spacecraft. Credit: ESA The European Space Agency’s LISA Pathfinder spacecraft, now sailing around the sun on a trajectory away from Earth, was deactivated Tuesday after a nearly 18-month mission testing previously-untried lasers, vacuum enclosures, exotic gold-platinum cubes and micro-thrusters needed for a trio of gravitational wave observatories set for…
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BepiColombo Mercury mission tested for journey into ‘pizza oven’
A view of the BepiColombo spacecraft stacked in launch configuration at the European Space Agency’s ESTEC test center in the Netherlands. The sunshield cover for Japan’s Mercury Magnetospheric Orbiter is pictured at lower right. Credit: Airbus Defense and Space Three spacecraft built in Europe and Japan have completed their final joint tests to ensure they…
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German-British consortium wins deal to build eight more Galileo satellites
Artist’s illustration of Galileo navigation satellites in orbit. Credit: OHB Eight more satellites for Europe’s Galileo navigation fleet will be built by Germany’s OHB System AG and Britain’s Surrey Satellite Technology Ltd. under a contract worth more than $350 million. The European Space Agency and the European Commission selected the same German-British industrial team that…
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Video: Replay of Soyuz MS-03 crew landing in Kazakhstan
Watch a replay of the landing of Oleg Novitskiy and Thomas Pesquet inside the Soyuz MS-03 crew capsule on the Kazakh stepped Friday, ending their six-and-a-half month expedition on the International Space Station. The duo departed the space station at 1047 GMT (6:47 a.m. EDT), braked out of orbit with a de-orbit burn and rode…
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Soyuz with two-man crew lands safely in Kazakhstan
STORY WRITTEN FOR CBS NEWS & USED WITH PERMISSION The Soyuz MS-03 spacecraft descends to the landing site in Kazakhstan under parachute. Credit: NASA TV/Spaceflight Now Leaving crewmate Peggy Whitson behind in orbit for an extended mission, a Russian cosmonaut and his French co-pilot undocked from the International Space Station early Friday and plunged back to Earth,…
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Live coverage: Two-man crew departs space station, returns home
Live coverage of the Expedition 51 mission on the International Space Station. Text updates will appear automatically below; there is no need to reload the page. Follow us on Twitter.
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Probe into crash of ESA lander recommends more checks on ExoMars descent craft
Artist’s concept of the Schiaparelli lander with its parachute deployed. Credit: ESA/ATG medialab Investigators who studied the crash of the European Space Agency’s Schiaparelli lander on Mars last year have recommended more stringent testing and computer modeling before the launch of a joint European-Russian landing craft in 2020 to avoid a repeat of the mistakes…
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Gravitational wave testbed repurposed as comet dust detector
In the final months of Europe’s LISA Pathfinder mission, scientists have found an unexpected use for the trailblazing testbed for a future gravitational wave observatory by tracking the tiny dings made by microscopic particles that strike the spacecraft in deep space, exploiting the impacts to learn about the population of dust grains cast off by…